Twitter Purchases Social Analytics Startup Hotspots.io

Hotspots.io, a startup promising to deliver “social media intelligence that you’ll actually use”, just announced on its home page that it has been acquired by Twitter.

Announcement

The Hotspots team said:

“We’re incredibly excited to announce that Twitter has acquired the Hotspots.io team! Starting today, we’ll be joining up with Twitter’s revenue engineering team where our focus will be on developing analytics tools for Twitter’s advertising and publishing partners. We founded Hotspots.io with the vision of helping companies and individuals maximize their social media ROI through actionable and accessible analytics, and we’re thrilled to be able to continue that work on a much larger scale at Twitter.”

Engineering Team

Following the acquisition, Hotspots’ staff would join Twitter’s revenue engineering team which would focus on developing new analytics tools for the social networking site’s advertising and publishing partners. This might be the end of whatever the firm had been working on, as rather than buying the product, Twitter seems to have invested in the people behind it and will use them in its existing software development teams. It isn’t clear what the Hotspot.io value proposition was, and its web site is very low on details. It calls itself a “social media intelligence that you’ll actually use,” and was in a private beta before the announcement.

Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, known as “tweets”. It was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with over 140 million active users as of 2012, generating over 340 millions tweets daily and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day.